How much money do you have to argue ? That agent could just as easily be OP’s Boyfriend.
It could be him under duress.
Much of the time contract termination can be reasonable as long as you make a solid effort.
Once I signed a lease and got fired before my actual move in. I was honest and got a full refund on my deposit.
The landlord could said “Well you owe us the full amount , lol”, but no reasonable court would enforce that.
Even if, good luck collecting I have no income!
Contracts are agreements, generally speaking most people and companies do not want to drag people in them, telcos excluded. All the termination clauses are put there, again in general, to provide some security to either party, not to entrap the other, again telcos mostly excluded.
If you don't want to be in a contract especially one just signed, typically most people will typically understand and let you of the hook, as long as entrapment is not their business model like telcos. This is mostly reflected in common cool-off period provisions, i.e provisions in the contract to terminate within a week or two.
> If a contract is automatically signed by an agent on your behalf, is it legally binding?
Probably not, unless you routinely have such things done which nobody does (yet). If it becomes routine, then likely yes: it would be likened to giving your human assistant permission to sign things on your behalf (although that is itself legally dodgy, it is often done and accepted).
There are many reasons why your signature on a contact might not be keyword legally binding (outright fraud by another party, you signing under duress, issues in the contract itself, overriding laws the effect of which you can't sign away (including cool-off provisions in, for example, UK distance selling regulations), the contract may have its own cool-off provision, and so forth). "An agent did it without my consent" may be enough, though you might end up having to show that in court, if the other side puts their foot down, at which point it comes down to whether the cost of proving your position is worth it compared to just sitting the contract out.
Of using cool-off provisions to cancel something your agent signed you up for, you might be on the hook for at least small part of what is agreed if the other party can be said to have accrued costs in the intervening time. You might be expected to send back physical items relating to the agreement at your own cost, for example.
It absolutely is legally binding in Blighty.
If you authorised an agent to act on your behalf, you are entirely responsible for their actions providing they acted within the bounds of authority you gave them.
Regardless, OPs software (his AI agent) isn't a legal entity and OP is entirely responsible for the software he chooses to use. Clamming the software is responsible for his actions (a software bug) isn't going to stand up in court. Whilst OP could claim damages for being provided with faulty software I suspect this will be very difficult to say the least; the authors of the AI agent will make the (very good) defence that their software was used incorrectly.
> OP could claim damages for being provided with faulty software
"Claude is AI and can make mistakes" is clear, no?
Generally, yes. There is a lot of case law on various types of software automated contracting (robotic process automation, automated securities transactions, etc.). Exceptions are generally where the other party had knowledge or should have known that the agent didn't have legal authority on behalf of the party it purports to bind.
However, none of that case law will accept a system signing a contract without verifying intent.
In that case, the party that did the signing is on the hook for the contract, and the person in whose name it was signed is not.
Sorry, what are you referring to by "verifying intent"? With narrow exceptions (wills, trusts, etc.), there's generally no requirement for a party to a contract to verify the mental state (if that is what you mean by intent) of the other party. There has to be some formal indication of intent to enter into a contract, but this is not what ordinary people think of by "intent", and it can be as simple as typing a name, clicking an approval button, or deploying a software tool to do something similar.
I don't know if it's legally binding but hope it is.
I love the saying "you can delegate authority but you can never delegate responsibility".
Your agent committed a crime in your behalf? You're responsible.
Almost certainly not if you didn’t explicitly give the command, but you’ll going to have to argue it in court if the other party wants to be difficult.
Not a lawyer but I can almost guarantee that the answer is yes. If it was a 'no', many malicious parties would simply start using that loophole.
In a civil contractual dispute you can only recover actual damages. If the contract was sent, and the other party performed work on it that had a cost for them, then most likely, yes, they would be awarded damages if you refused to compensate them for any costs incurred prior to notification that the acceptance had been sent in error.
The other outcome would be clearly inequitable: forcing the counter party to eat the loss for your irresponsible use of an AI agent.
But if I paste an image of your signature onto a contract that says you give me a million pounds, that can't be legally binding for you, can it?
No, because you are a separate individual who does not have authority to sign a contract on my behalf.
Claude isn't. It's a tool, that isn't capable of signing a contract any more that Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop is.
OP used it as a tool to sign the contract. The question would be whether they did so knowingly and intentionally, if not then whether that invalidates the contract.
> Claude isn't. It's a tool, that isn't capable of signing a contract any more that Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop is.
Incorrect. Claude.is far more capable. E.g. it found and applied the sig without user knowledge.
Wrong. Have you read your agents TOS? You run the agent, you accept all responsibility for what it does. You are free to sue Anthropic to try and get your money back but you already indemnified them of liability, so good luck.
The GP asked what happens if THEY did it, and they are (I give them the benefit of doubt, though you can’t be sure these days) a natural person. A clanker obviously can’t commit forgery – or any crime, being a nonperson – and sure, you can’t sue OpenAnthro Corp. if their clanker does anything unintended (which makes it utter lunacy that companies just blindly trust these things, but I digress), but that’s not what was asked.
But also, you can’t ToS your way out of criminal responsibility. If OpenAnthro Corp. offered services of human agents (remember those?!) and one of their agents committed a crime while working on a client request, no ToS in the world would exonerate them.
You are a legal entity that can be sued. Agent is a tool that you run and are fully responsible for.
True, that would be forgery. I think proving whether the agent truly went rogue would be 'load bearing'.
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If you did not yourself intentionally sign something, in sound mind, it’s obviously not binding. But ultimately it’s up to a court to decide if you’re telling the truth that you didn’t do it.
No, application of the principal of respondeat superior would most likely be applied to an AI agent the same as a human employee. An employer is held responsible for the actions of an employee even if it is clearly contrary to their intentions.
Fair point, but I’m not sure that applies to an employee literally forging the employer’s personal signature. And equating a user–computer program relationship with an employer–employee relationship (where there’s an actual contract to that effect) doesn’t feel right anyway. Agents are still just programs and programs cannot enter contracts (like employment) given that they are not persons. This is a computer system malfunctioning.
This opens obvious loophooles. If you had deleted all logs and trajectories, courts can't trace it. Law wasn't written for or has caught up to non-human entities capable of autonomously acting
Almost definetely not. But given how cagey claude code is with its sessions it may be impossible to prove it was done by claude.
Even if not, you'll find yourself in a hot mess explaining why you sent the signed contract to the other party.